


Can't find nothing at all

by fuzzy_dunlop



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-01-04 23:21:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12178488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzy_dunlop/pseuds/fuzzy_dunlop
Summary: Set during and after Head. Fiona fixes Kyle (sort of).





	1. Kyle

Kyle had not felt like himself for weeks, if that could even be said – he didn't exactly remember what feeling like himself felt like. Most of the time Kyle's brain activity resembled and old TV with misplaced rabbit-ear antennas – maddening blurry noise and gray spots and stripes flickering. He felt empty, but not numb. This emptiness was different. He felt the emptiness itself eating away at him, making him restless and tired at the same time, unable to focus on anything or make meaningful connections to the outside world. Of course, even if Kyle had felt better, his speech, more specifically, the lack of it, was not helpful in communicating his feelings either.

Kyle felt somewhat different around the girl whose room he was hiding out in. What he had going with Zoe was not exactly your classic boy meets girl human connection either. Zoe felt familiar even though he had no coherent recollection of their relationship before the girl found him in his house, covered in blood, the rage in which he had killed his mother slowly being replaced by complete and utter despair. He felt safer with Zoe. Different. She couldn't understand him and he didn't understand what she wanted from him but being with Zoe somehow made the white noise in his head less pertinent. She offered some kind of stability. 

Since Kyle had lost the bigger part of his vocabulary somewhere between losing most of his body parts and acquiring new ones, he could not think in sentences (or words, as a matter of fact). This was part of the reason his mind felt so fuzzy. He had died as a college boy and come back as a toddler before the rapid speech development stage. After hours and days of practice with Zoe, Kyle could recognize most of the objects in their room and name them. He could understand some questions and provide yes/no replies. 

At present, Kyle was alone in the room, playing a children's computer game Zoe had downloaded for him. Kyle heard a word through the speakers and was presented with 6 pictures. His task was to choose a picture that matched the word. The game kept repeating the same word until he got it right. Although his vocabulary was slowly improving, the game got frustrating at times and Kyle had to leave the computer and pace the room in order to avoid smashing the machine. Zoe had made it very clear that this was not allowed. It had taken five near-disasters for the request to make its way into the more intact parts of Kyle's mind and a couple more for him to actually manage to stop himself. 

Kyle had calmed down enough to return to the game when the door suddenly opened. The boy flinched, not sure whether he should duck behind the bed or take the intruder on with his new-found Hulk-like strength. This doubt was a sign of him getting some of his self-control back but of course he didn't have the capacity for such complex introspection, he was just agitated and confused. Kyle froze. Then something in his fuzzy-noisy brain clicked. The flicker subsided and he recognized the intruder. He had seen those things in the videos he used to watch with Zoe. His muscles could even vaguely recall himself trying to keep up with something similar while running. Well, himself or one of his caveman ancestors, the difference wasn't obvious these days. The creature didn't feel dangerous to him. It ran to Kyle and started licking his face. A tiny flame of hope flickered inside Kyle as he felt the most connected to anything at all since his return from the other side when he mumbled: "Dawg".


	2. Fiona

Fiona was feeling exhausted. Not that it took much to get her into this state lately. She seemed to be getting sicker by the minute and couldn't even tell whether this constant half-dead state was due to the illness or its treatment. Not that it mattered anyway. The push Fiona had needed to attempt suicide two days before had not been a very strong one. It really wasn't about doing what was better for the coven, even though that was the argument used to convince her. It was much more about not becoming a living corpse before it was time to turn into a dead one. It was about stopping having humiliating sex with the man that had been stalking her as a little girl and kept rotting dead bodies in his bathtub, always reminding Fiona of what she was about to become. It was about not living out her last days in a constant limbo between homicidal and suicidal, only to expire of natural causes before making a decision. Regardless of the seemingly obvious solution to all those problems, she was stopped by her very own instinct of self-preservation, planted into every living thing since the beginning of time. It was the same thing that encouraged a trapped wolf to chew off its paw, a soldier use his friend as a human shield and appeared to Fiona out of all things possible in the creepy and unusually verbal shape of Spalding, forcing her to return from the point of no return and not give anyone the satisfaction of getting rid of her. 

Although Fiona had managed to hide how bitter and paranoid the Sacred Taking had made her and even acknowledged this ever so slightly murderous act of courage, the whole thing had made her feel even worse than before. She had found she still had some fight left in her which she was going to put to good (opinions may differ on what that meant) use but her feelings were deeply hurt. Fiona's too kind and even spineless daughter Cordelia who had only days before defended Fiona in front of the council with no good reason, the woman who would no doubt weep herself to sleep every day for the rest of her life if Fiona had really fried this clueless detective's brain, this kind pure soul had skillfully tried to orchestrate her death. Deep down, Fiona suspected Cordelia's decision had less to do with what Cordelia had become and more to do with what Fiona had been all along. Prefering not to dwell on it much longer, Fiona had whiskey for second breakfast and let the big wolf-like dog that had been following her all the way from Cornrow City into the house. The creature had looked pronouncedly unhappy and Fiona had found herself unable to stand its howling just minutes after of getting rid of the previous howler, Delphine's detached head. She fed the thing a big plate of leftover fried chicken and lit a cigarette with her brain, at which point the canine's fur stood on end and made it look like an enormous dust mop.

Recovered from the sudden change of energy, Endora the former suburban family pet was just about to lay down in the kitchen and Fiona was contemplating taking a nap as well before everyone else got back and she would need to keep up appearances again when something caught the dog's attention and it sprinted up the stairs, growling. Regretting the whiskey breakfast and not saving some of that chicken for herself, Fiona sighed and took off after Endora, ever so slightly worried about what the dog could destroy (or find) upstairs. When she caught up, however, she found something she would have gladly let Endora destroy: Cordelia's ex Hank with a box in his hands and a defeated look on his face. The defeated look cheered Fiona up a bit as she told Endora to behave. The creature, hoping there would be more chicken where the previous plate came from, eagerly did as told. "You got a dog?" Hank asked, surprised. "Well, one dog moves out, another one moves in. You know, it's the cycle of life," Fiona replied. She was amused by the lost look on Hank's face as he tried to come up with a witty comeback. Not feeling up to exchanging pleasantries much longer, Fiona looked at the bottom of the box. It gave in and Hank's stuff fell out. Fiona wondered if a grown man's belongings could really consist mainly of one hideous-looking comforter. Well, seeing was believing. "Good to see you, Hank," she said cheerfully and was about to head off to her bedroom when Endora took off again. "What is it, girl?" asked Fiona but instead of waiting for a reply headed to investigate. Endora had ran into Zoe and Madison's bedroom where she was enthusiastically licking the face of some blonde goonish frat boy. "Dawwwg," the moron blabbered, making Fiona wonder if he even had the limited mental capacity it took to become a frat boy. "You need to leave," Fiona said, not feeling up to actually making him. About to leave herself, she heard a loud crunch that almost made her jump. She didn't want to turn around and for a split second had an overwhelming desire to either just ignore it or light the whole damn room on fire to not have to deal with whatever was going on in there. She physically felt the dog go colder by the second without even looking. "Dawwgggg ..." mumbled the boy again in a clearly distressed cracking voice.


	3. Realizations

Kyle had not meant to hurt the furry creature trying to make friends with him. He had felt warmth radiating from the dog's body and a sense of kindness he hadn't felt for a long time. As the dog had put her paws on Kyle's shoulders, the boy had taken hold of the canine and pulled closer. His grip had been as hard as life itself depended on it. That was unfortunately the case for Endora, who was no match for the boy's abnormal strenghth. The dog whined quietly and went limp in his arms. That alarmed Kyle enough to let go. He tried to lift the animal's head but it fell right back on the floor in a strange position. The dog's eyes were glassy and unresponsive, the warmth Kyle had felt quickly fading away. Kyle looked up at Fiona who had managed to make herself look. "I will end you," the strange woman said.

Despite the exhaustion, Fiona was royally pissed off. Those girls bring home a boy, spectacularly fail to send him back to wherever he came from before breakfast, and run off to the next one. Meanwhile, this individual has free roam of the house and implied permission to kill anyone in sight. The youngster seemed to be some fucked-up bundle of deep emotional issues and beast-like strenghth. Fiona threw the numbnut into the nearest wall, dropping some curtains on him in the process. She proceeded to sit on Zoe's bed to wait for the boy to emerge from under the pile of fabric. He did not seem to be bothered to try and push the curtains aside but instead ripped right through the middle. As the moron's head caught her sight again, Fiona noticed he was sobbing and had a look of total despair on his clueless face. Not really intending to end him, she approached to kick him out and this time personally make sure he's really gone. It was then that Fiona saw the huge scars showing from under the boy's shirt and a curious smell entered her airways. It wasn't as obvious as with Delphine's zombies (or whatever was left of them for Fiona to see) or her dog who was currently in the process of passing over to the other side but it was there. This entire room smelled like death and the source of the otherworldly smell appeared to be this weeping boy. 

Kyle had sensed Fiona's anger in the air around him. All of the hair on his body stood on end but contrary to his usual straightforward way of reacting by destroying everything he considered a threat and then some more, he sat still, his heartbeat fast and eyes still full of tears. He had a feeling Fiona might send him to where the newly dead dog was on her way to (his brain couldn't process any other way he could be "ended") but didn't really care. He was tired and crappy was the best he had felt for weeks. He had experienced hope for the first time after his ham-handed revival and had it taken away, he had taken it away himself. Although his limited intellectual capacities did not allow for a coherent inner monologue, something in him had convinced his primitive consciousness that there was no point in fighting. He wiped his eyes and observed as Fiona sat down on the floor next to him, the electric rage that had filled the room slowly fading. Amber eyes looked through him, straight into his troubled brain. 

Fiona had no real intention of ending Kyle, hadn't ever had it. It would have only made an unnecessary addition to her body count, not to mention an arduos cleanup. She had nothing to gain from this, really nothing at all. Instead, she was going to make the undead frat monkey clean up his own mess and later on try to insert some sense into that short-circuited brain of his. "Come on now," Fiona said in a rather encouraging tone. "We have to bury this dog." Kyle wiped his eyes and stood up. He took the dog, trying not to look at her, and followed Fiona down the stairs into the garden where a big rose bush was in bloom. "What do you think, boy?" the woman asked. "That's a fine resting place, isn't it?" Kyle mumbled something incomprehensible. "That's what I thought," Fiona replied. "I'll go find a shovel. Stay here." 

It took Fiona a while to locate a shovel. The gardener had for some reason put three combination locks on his shed door. Fiona wasn't sure if she really wanted to look inside a shed that well guarded because this level of protection was unlikely to be just for some top notch garden tools but opened the locks one by one anyway. Whatever the gardener was hiding, it was nowhere in sight. Everywhere she looked, she saw just tools, some of them of unknown purpose for her. Having finally managed to retrieve a shovel, Fiona made her way back to the rose bush. "Here, that shou-" she started but stopped mid-word. There was a hole big enough for at least a hippo in front of her and the boy was standing in it, his hands dirty right up to his elbows and his fingertips bleeding.


	4. Fiona

"Come on now, get in there. Jesus, boy, I'm not going to look," Fiona said, ushering Kyle into her bathroom. For some reason, the boy jumped as if electrocuted each time Fiona touched him, however innocent or accidental that was. His hands were still bloody and since getting out of the hole had turned out to be difficult, most of him was covered in dirt. Fiona handed him a bar of soap and ran the shower herself just in case. This creature had after all dug a hole so big he had struggled to get out of it, using his bare hands. Fiona closed the bathroom door and returned to the half-eaten peach cobbler she had managed to find in Delphine's room. She sat on the bed and listened to the splashing and grunting coming from the bathroom. Satisfied the boy was indeed scrubbing, not eating the toilet seat or whatever people in this kind of state of mind usually did, the supreme dug into the cake.

Looking at the muddy footprints headed towards the bathroom, Fiona chewed on the sugary peaches and fought hard not to give in to the exhaustion that had overwhelmed her again the second she sat down. She had been struggling for the better part of the day to keep out Myrtle's expertly planted visions of festering and putrefying, grossing out even the fucking Axeman of New Orleans in the process. She had to get up and walk around the room for a bit to shake off the disgust she'd started feeling towards herself and to avoid going to sleep as she was sure the visions would surely catch up with her then and the zombie kid would have free roam of the house again. Instead, Fiona finished off the cake and decided to once again concentrate on the project at hand and try to find out what on god's green earth had taken this boy back to the early days of human evolution. 

Fiona emptied her head of all the useless thoughts floating around and put her hand on the plate, covering the cake crumbs left. She fixed her eyes on one of her lamp's bulbs and felt the hand start moving, arranging the crumbs in a pattern. When her hand finally stopped, Fiona turned to look at the crumbs. They had formed the shape of a four-leaf clover. Fiona concentrated again and found herself still sitting on her bed but a man with a tattoo machine was working on her arm and she suddenly felt very drunk. The man was coloring in a four-leaf clover. The boy Fiona had left in the bathroom was standing in front of her, drinking a beer and blabbering something about his career, surprisingly enough, in proper English. Suddenly, it was her drinking the beer and where she had just been sitting, she saw another goonish frat boy, getting a four-leaf clover colored in on his arm. Before Fiona had time to become confused, she was stepping out of the room, a Kanji character itching on her ankle, the currently zombified kid and the clover boy following right behind. And then there was nothing. Fiona was in her room again, standing in the doorway, the imaginary drunken buzz gone and the shower finally quiet.

Confused, Fiona returned to her bed and sat down, trying to make sense of the visions and contemplating the possiblity the cobbler had been "special". She had intended to interpret the crumbs to find out what had happened to the unfortunate boy to make him so goddamn strong and stupid but instead had been treated to a frat boys' night out and apparently been bounced around aimlessly in each of their drunken consciousnesses. The only thing she had found out was that apparently at one point, not very long ago, this boy had been able to speak in full sentences and had had a taste for cheap beer, neither of which came as a surprise. The real surprise, however, came from Fiona's bathroom, wearing a fluffy towel around his waist, sporting a four-leaf clover tattoo on his arm and the Kanji character in all likelihood originating from a takeout menu on his leg. He was missing three fingernails but seemed to be more disconcerted by Fiona's staring.


	5. Kyle

Kyle had not cared about how much he hurt himself while digging the hole due to being overwhelmed by regret, despair and a lurking fear that the hole might actually be for himself. The physical exhaustion that followed, however, was making him scrub slower and slower and the missing fingernails and blisters were making it hard to hold on to the soap. In the cluttered mess of his incoherent thoughts, one that was completely clear was making its way into his semi-consciousness. Kyle remembered killing his mother only in fragments but the events leading up to it were somehow completely intact in his memory. When Fiona was trying to get him in the shower, he had got confused and felt like he was still home, being told to clean up by his mother. He'd only snapped out of it when the woman turned around with obvious indifference and left the bathroom, and he was alone again, able to look around and take in the fact this bathroom was nothing like the one his disturbing memories were linked to.

He began feeling uneasy again once he emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and saw Fiona sitting on the bed, thoughtfully eyeing him from head to toe. Had Kyle had his old cognitive abilities, he would have understood the reason for this shameless staring were the various big scars all over his body and the fact one of those scars marked a line between areas with completely different shades of chest hair. This version of Kyle, however, felt increasingly uncomfortable. He looked around, not knowing whether he was looking for a weapon or something to cover himself up with. Before he could find either of these things, Fiona threw a ball of fabric at him, which to his great relief turned out to be his own boxers, sweater, pants and even matching socks. Kyle shook off the oncoming terror and disappeared back into the bathroom. 

When he exited the bathroom for the second time, Fiona was not there at all. The boy sat on the bed, not knowing what to do. His condition rarely allowed him to know it anyway but, what scared and confused him further, he had not been out of Zoe's room ever since he moved in and was not entirely sure he remembered what the hallway looked like and whether he could make his way back. The flashback he'd had in the bathroom didn't help his confusion either. Just when Kyle was about to panic, Fiona returned. As much as Zoe seemed to calm him down, Fiona felt unsettling to Kyle. The odd thing about it, however, was that with this deep unease came no desire whatsoever to save himself by either leaving or going beserk. He would not have been able to explain it even if he'd had the vocabulary for it but there was certain comfort in sensing Fiona could easily destroy him before he could embark on a path of destruction himself. So when she handed him a cup of water and told him to drink up, he did it without hesitation. 

The water should have been refreshing after all the hard work Kyle had done earlier in the bright sunshine but it tasted like peaches and cigarettes and a suspicious warm buzz slowly made its way from his stomach to further parts of his body until it seemed to fill him completely. This should have been a clear sign that the drink could not be trusted. Instead of getting suspicious, however, Kyle emptied the cup in three big gulps and sat down next to Fiona, barely noticing how close. They sat there quietly for a bit since Kyle was getting overwhelmed with a flood of memories, some of them from his childhood, most of them quite recent, quite a few not feeling familiar at all, and Fiona had finally understood there was no point in talking to him, at least in his current state. 

The earlier memories now resurfacing in a warm and woozy haze felt strange to Kyle. They were memories of different stages of his life but somehow they felt foreign, there was very little emotion involved. The best possible way Kyle could describe them later on was "default". He remembered getting lost in a Walmart but had difficulty remembering how he was found, or in fact even which one of the thousands of Walmarts it was. Then this day came up where he was walking a dog whose name he couldn't recall and who looked exactly like the one he had buried just an hour ago. He would later wonder why he'd remembered that random day from when he was 13 at all - nothing happened, the dog behaved exactly as one would expect of a dog, he was walking it in a park where he knew no one and if he would have tried to visualize the way home, he would not have succeeded. He felt more connected to his recent memories, though. A sudden sadness different from the hopeless agitation of the past weeks took hold of him when he recalled the last time he had gone out with his friends and realized he now had none left. He looked down at his ankle and was puzzled how he went from making fun of his friends getting dumb tattoos to getting not one but two matching very soon after. He'd been drunk, he guessed, and something had thrown him off. "Beginning and end my ass," Kyle mumbled, eyeing the Kanji symbols on his leg. A full sentence making its way through the fog was completely unexpected and it was followed by a storm of completely articulate thoughts about recent events in Kyle's life and how he felt about them. The warm buzz was still there but Kyle felt conscious as ever. Having been tense and on edge the whole time he had spent around Fiona, he finally relaxed. The annoying blur that had filled his brain was almost gone, replaced by something resembling basic emotions, age-appropriate inner speech and an ability to take in his surroundings. He turned to Fiona who was now looking at him, not through him. A wide smile spread across her face when she asked: "Now what did you say was wrong with those levees again?".


	6. Fiona

The kitchen was as empty as Fiona had left it hours ago, a drooly plate on the floor a silent reminder of a dog that once had been. Knowing what she was about to do and how it was going to leave her feeling like she'd just received a lobotomy, Fiona felt remorseful about wasting energy on trolling Hank and throwing around curtains earlier. As she was trying to gather what strength she had left, it dawned upon her it was the first time she'd seen this particular type of creature. Fine, that damn Minotaur had probably not been that different but it had also been designed with a clear purpose to evoke fear and leave a trail of bodies behind, while this boy, although almost as strong, was clueless, clumsy and leaking anguish out of every single pore in his undead body. Nevertheless, as soon as Fiona had seen Kyle get out of the bathroom, she had realized the biggest problem wasn't him being undead. It was that he wasn't him at all, but he also wasn't any of the other goons he had become some kind of a crazy quilt of. "Idiots," Fiona mumbled, poured some water into a big red cup and took a seat behind the TV.

 

It was one of the very few times Fiona had tried to use mind control to restore memory instead of casually wiping it of anything that could become an inconvenience, half the time not bothering to replace the blanks with anything at all. She had found people were so uncomfortable with losing time they filled it in themselves, often before they even realized anything was wrong at all. It was also the first time she was dealing with years instead of one or two specific events that could easily be confabulated. With little time to prepare, Fiona had made up a somewhat logical sequence of typical life events, if such things existed, in hopes that if enough coherent memories were to find their way into Kyle's brain, and she were to turn up the temperature in there just a bit, they would start forming connections. This was supposed to result in him building functional thinking patterns based on his memories of having had them before. Fiona turned the TV onto an empty channel, concentrating on the same loud grey blur Kyle had experienced in his brain since his spectacularly inadequate revival. Of course, he had not described it as there was no monosyllabic way of conveying how he felt, but Fiona had come to think of the boy's head as an empty space, and a sheet of paper or, say, the wall seemed to tranquil to possibly represent his current state. Within the blur, Fiona saw herself wandering around in an A&P store the size of the world. It was the strangest thing, seeing herself on the screen in that stupid blue frilly dress and at the same time actually being there, looking up at shelves as she had not done in decades, not daring to float down a few of those marshmallow cones from the very top one. Instead of an unpleasant trip down memory lane, a mashup of different events followed, some of them from her own experiences, some made up on the go, a few wise words from books read a long time ago and fragments of the multiplication table aimlessly floating around. It felt like the trip had taken a lifetime but when she looked at the clock, only four minutes had passed. Surprised she didn't feel like she was going to drop dead any minute at all, Fiona spat in the cup and slowly made her way back upstairs.

 

***

 

Late that night, having poured more vodka into her guest's tea than the cup should have held, Fiona returned to her room, now truly feeling like she was going to expire, but much less distraught by it than usual. The drunken exhaustion that had become her default state during the last couple of weeks had crossed some kind of a line and turned into something much more bearable. She hadn't needed to fight off mental images of being devoured by worms while still somewhat alive ever since the cake-induced hallucinations and Kyle's new memories had taken over. Instead, she had been delighted to see the dimwit she'd been stuck with for the better part of the day become not a dimwit at all. In fact, he might have quite possibly been the only person with whom words weren't insults even when they were not, and silences didn't scream murder. If someone were to ask, but of course they never did, why Fiona had gone through the trouble, an honest answer or even one that made sense would have been unlikely. Finding a better card player or replacing a suddenly departed guard dog no one except Hank had got a chance to meet were certainly not it. Sometime after returning from the shed and discovering Kyle in that goddamn hole that people were bound to start asking questions about very soon, she had decided to go through with it just because she could. She had shown those sweet dumb girls, all too eager to take over, thinking they'd be the next big thing, how little they really knew about anything at all. But mostly, she had shown herself she could do better than feel threatened by a bunch of magician's assistants with too much ambition for their own good or resort to mothball-infused pillow talk with her childhood stalker. As that day was becoming the next one, Fiona climbed into bed sober for the first time in ages, pulled the covers over her head and drifted off to a land of bizarre dreams.


	7. Kyle

It was still dark when Kyle woke up on the floor next to Zoe's bed. He'd had some time to get used to being what Fiona had described as "not all there but okay" but still woke up with the same anticipation of oncoming restless despair every morning. Because the blanket was still in the bed, Kyle curled up in a ball and waited, not daring to move or think anything that would push him back to the state he so desperately wanted to avoid but had also become so used to that it felt unnatural to experience anything different. Seconds passed and nothing happened. Instead of a disturbing blur, dismay about having ended up on the floor in his boxers dawned upon him. Kyle dug out his socks from under the bed, put them on and then took a look at his two lovers who were still sleeping, facing away from each other but awkwardly holding hands. It was a single bed and the fact no hands or feet were hanging off the sides was peculiar enough without Kyle being there, so it was no wonder he had rolled off as soon as he stopped paying attention and clinging to either of the girls. In a way, the current situation was an accurate reflection of their relationship in the waking hours as well — somehow Kyle's recovery had made things not less, but more awkward. Even though he could talk, he had trouble coming up with things to say, and Zoe and Madison had become cautious with their words as Kyle was getting reacquainted with the world outside their room. The only thing they still had a mutual, wordless understanding of, was what had preceded them climbing into this useless tiny bed together and going to sleep, clinging to each other until one of them couldn't anymore. Not wanting to be there to start the day with clumsy greetings, looks directed at the floor and facing the transformation from lovers to strangers that had occurred overnight, Kyle picked up the rest of his clothes from the floor and retired to the bathroom.

Kyle had been living in this house for weeks in his state of diminished capacity and while he had felt horrible in his own head, he had been quite used to what was around him. Of course, it had been the same room with very little variation in ... anything. After undergoing Fiona's unexpected intervention, however, he felt distinctly out of place. During the last couple of days he had come to understand he had only been out of the room two, maybe three times, and never unsupervised. For that reason, now that he was competent to move around on his own without leaving a distinct path of destruction behind him, even getting food from the kitchen felt like a special operation, and he always lurked around the corner to make sure no one else was occupying the kitchen before he made his move. Even more frustrating was the fact that he didn't feel much better when he was back in their room either. With his new-found sanity had come the understanding he didn't really know anything about either girl he was sharing a bed with and a bunch of questions, some of which he felt too awkward to ask and some of which he was afraid to get answers to. While he was beginning to allow himself to feel ever so slightly relieved of having been abruptly removed from his old life because he had not been sure whether he ever could have removed himself from it on his own, he was now also facing the fact he had committed murder in the process. And even though he knew he had not been himself while doing it, a part of him would always wonder how close he had been to it before all his inhibitions went to the wind, and why the final push had been the words "maybe you needed it as much as I did".

It would have been wrong to say Kyle found Fiona more approachable than the others. When it was her rummaging through the fridge, his next meal still had to wait. But there was no air of cautiousness around her like the one he was bothered by in his own room. Fiona's first impression of Kyle had been so bad he had thought she would kill him (and had not been too shaken up about the prospect), which meant there was not much he could do that could cause more damage than he had done within two minutes of them first laying eyes on each other. So when Fiona found him brooding at the kitchen table that particular day, Kyle was grateful for the opportunity to participate in a game of gin rummy that was bound to relieve him of the money he had won in the last one. It meant he was being spared of aimlessly wandering around the house, trying to find some new purpose to his existence or wondering where everyone he knew had gone and what they weren't telling him, at least for the time being. Most of the questions floating around in Kyle's head were the kind no one but himself could answer, the most pressing of them being what he was supposed to do now that he had his cognitive capabilities back but everything else he'd had before was gone. But there were other things as well. Now that Kyle could take in what was going on around him, many things left him thinking whether he was experiencing them because he wasn't quite right in the head or something seriously weird was going on. There were dead houseplants going in full bloom in a matter of minutes. There were objects changing places without anyone moving them. And one night, there had been a man wearing white face paint, dressed in a hopelessly outdated Halloween costume complete with a hat embellished with skulls, walking into a wall, never to be seen again. He thought he could ask Fiona but when it came down to it, it all sounded so stupid even in his own head that he couldn't get the words out. Instead, he kept quiet, smoked an unknown number of cigarettes Fiona seemed to produce out of nowhere and light with nothing like it was normal (Kyle knew it wasn't but began to doubt it more and more each time it happened again), until his hands started shaking, and he realized he was coming close to losing his breakfast. Then he finally spoke up: "I have this tattoo, I mean, I must have been so wasted. I think I was slurring how stupid those things were while the guy was doing it. Don't even know what it means. I tried going over some takeout menus last night but came up with nothing. Probably some noodles dish spelled wrong, huh?" "Beginning and end," Fiona said. "I'm as surprised as you are."


End file.
